In the spring of 2011, McDonald and a group of friends, all of color, queer and allied, while walking to a 24 hour store were verbally accosted by a group of racist drunks outside a local bar. McDonald confronted them and was subsequently assaulted by a woman, who smashed a glass in McDonald’s face, puncturing her jaw and lacerating her saliva gland. The fight that followed resulted in the self-defense stabbing death of Dean Schmitz, who McDonald and supporters identified as an instigator in the confrontation.

SYREETA MCFADDEN is a Brooklyn based writer, photographer and adjunct professor of English. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches and Storyscape Journal. She is the managing editor of the online literary magazine, Union Station, and a co-curator of Poets in Unexpected Places. You can follow her on Twitter @reetamac.

Syreeta McFadden is a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US and an editor of Union Station Magazine.

To be quite sure, the murderous DDS was indeed responsible for a stunning tragedy: killing a beloved lion in a Zimbabwe national park and then beheading him for the sake of a trophy. The bloody practise drips with ugly anachronisms, from being a shabby and pathetic display of masculine prowess that demonstrates the ultimate poverty of manhood as an idea, to the colonialist overtones of a white man paying 50,000 dollars to fly to an African nation and turn some of its endangered fauna into a ...

During his brief speech in support of Pride, Gutiérrez interrupted the president to say, “President Obama, release all LGBTQ in detention centers. President Obama, stop the torture and abuse of trans women in detention centers.” The President responded with: “Listen, you’re in ...

Yesterday, the White House hosted its annual LGBT Pride Reception, an invitation only event for some of the nation’s most well-known and well-respected LGBTQ activists.

“Symbols are the key to telepathy. The mind wraps its secrets in symbols; when we discover the symbols that shape our enemy’s thought, we can penetrate the vault of his mind.”

— Lady Deirdre Skye, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Every political action must be met with an equal and opposite reaction, it seems. To read writer and critic Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Twitter feed is to see him barraged with people suggesting that the turning tide against the public display of the Confederate flag in the US is a mere distraction.

The “Confederate Flag not that big of a deal” argument is cousin to “Oh it’s class, not race” argument that afflicts liberals.